Creating A Digital Strategy Part 1: Building Your Online Foundation

It seems to me that many companies, large or small, lack a comprehensive and effective digital strategy. I think its time we face it, the internet of things, and automation are taking over, and to compete as a business you really need to think digital or you may not be around in 10 years if not 5 or less.
It might not be that businesses don’t know this; they may just not know where to find the knowledge necessary to build a digital strategy for their business.  This blog series is meant to help business owners build a digital strategy to grow their company in the next 3 to 5 years.

Digital Influences Every Business

The power of digital is increasingly influencing consumer purchasing for business-to-business and business-to-consumer at an alarming rate. eCommerce alone is rapidly growing, directly accounting for trillions of dollars in sales worldwide in 2013 for B2B and B2C.  Trillions more in purchases are influenced by digital such as reviews, google searches, social media, and many other digital means.
It is clear that digital media and the Internet is going to heavily influence every aspect of business regardless of size or industry now and even more so in the future. Therefore you must have a well-researched and scalable digital strategy that not only accounts for staying competitive online now but also provides a solid foundation for the future.
I really can’t stress this enough. Blindly throwing money at internet marketing because its something you should invest in without a clear strategy and well thought out plan is NOT going to work.  You have to be involved and understand why and where you are spending your money to see results with internet marketing and digital media.
Part one of this series is going to cover the foundation and groundwork that you will need in order to build a strong online presence. This digital strategy will be broken up into three parts. Part 1 will cover your website and website technology, part 2 will cover traffic acquisition and part 3 will cover converting that traffic into paying customers.

Step 1: Branding & Identity

The foundation of your online business is actually not your website, it is your brand. I cant tell you how many times I have talked with business owners that underestimate how a logo and variations of your logo will influence your brand online. Social media, your website, and many other online channels will have different image size requirements. This mean your brand has to be easily recognizable and interchangeable between all of those different online environments and sizes.
If your brand does not work well for this you will need to invest in it and develop a new style guide that will fit these requirements. This doesn’t mean you have to change your name, overall logo concept, and even colors. It just might mean you need a brand refresh to better fit the digital times of the 21^st century.
Keep in mind that your brand is more than just a logo, it is an identity. The logo, identity mark, name, fonts, colors, and images are ALL means for you to express that identity in a way that a potential customer can recognize and identify with. That means you should be looking for a COMPLETE style guide for your brand that has all of the above working together to accomplish that goal; not just a logo. These assets all need to be in sync with eachother so that you have consistency with your brand as you don’t want to confuse your customers. You want them to be able to recognize your brand immediately without even having to think about it. So take the time to develop a style that fits your company and your vision and then stick with it.
Minor refreshments and alterations over time can be a good way to keep the brand current and fresh, but try to avoid straying too far from that original style (i.e. if you have alternate logos stay within your color scheme). A useful tip when developing a brand is to remember that simple is always better. If there is one trend we have seen in the evolution of major brands over the years is that they are becoming simpler and less busy. Why? They adapt better to the various forms of marketing platforms, they are more easily recognizable, they are easier to replicate and manipulate, and they don’t distract the customer. Here are some options for finding a brand refresh or optimizing your brand online:

Low Cost:  $50-$2,000

1) 99 Designs
2) Logo Garden
3) Low Profile Freelancer

Medium Cost: $2,000 – $10,000

1) Experienced Branding Freelancer
2) Lower End Branding / Graphic Design Agency

High Cost:  $10,000 +

1) High end branding agency
Conclusion:
Make sure your brand works for digital, meaning it should be easily interchangeable for all the different screen and image size requirements that you will need it to be. If it does not meet these requirements, invest in a refresh.  It will be worth the money. Your brand is your company and if you have the cash, $10000 might seem like a lot for a brand refresh, but if your company is worth millions or better yet billions, that money will pale in comparison to the value of a well recognized online brand.

Step 2: Your Website Technology

Your website should never be a finished product. Think of your website as an online extension of your business.  You should always be able to improve your website on a weekly if not daily basis. If you do not have time to do this yourself either hire someone in house or a third party to do so, and in many cases you will need to do both.
Unless you are a technology company with a lot of programming and web development experience or have the big bucks to spend a lot on third party development you will most likely need a content management system to manage your website’s content. This will allow you to manage your website’s content without significant coding experience.
Now comes the hard part. Figuring out the right content management system or platform to build your website on.

CMS for non-eCommerce:

1) WordPress
2) Drupal
3) Joomla
4) Expression Engine
5) SiteCore
6) Adobe CQ
7) WordPress VIP
8) Many More….
Winner: WordPress 
In most cases you should go with the safe choice of WordPress. It is the number one CMS by far for the top 10k, top 100k, and the top million sites. Why? Because it is easy to use, scalable, and open source.  It also has great flexibility for strong UI/UX and can easily be integrated with other platforms or other development environments you may need to build with. For instance a lot of our eCommerce websites are now built with both the Magento and WordPress CMS platforms. WordPress powers the content pages and Magento powers the eCommerce side of the site.

If you have done your research and feel that WordPress is not the best choice for you that is fine, just make sure that your reasons are well thought out and fit your business model for the foreseeable future.

eCommerce CMS:

1) Magento
2) Shopify
3) OsCommerce
4) BigCommerce
5) Prestashop
6) Drupal Ubercart
7) WooCommerce
8) Volusion
9) Opencart
10) Many More…
Winner: Magento

Magento is dominating the eCommerce space powering 26% of the top 1 million eCommerce sites. With a free community edition as powerful as many enterprise platforms and of course an enterprise edition at a great price of only 15k per year, Magento can be used for both small and large companies.
Magento is not for everyone. If you do not think it is a great fit, make sure you know why because your eCommerce platform will be the foundation of your online presence for a long time and a platform migration is not fun or cheap.

Non-CMS Frameworks:

PHP:

1) Laravel
2) Phalcon
3) Symfony
4) CodeIgniter
5) YII
6) CakePHP
7) Zend
Winner: Laravel

Over 50% of the web is built on PHP so you can’t go wrong with a PHP framework. Laravel has been blowing out the competition by generating a huge market share of the PHP frameworks and is poised to continue dominating in 2014.

Python:

1) Django
2) Pyramid
3) Bottle
4) Flask
Winner: Django 
Python is an awesome programing language that has incredible power. Python isn’t for everyone but if you have made the choice to go with it as your web frameworks main programming language, Django is the framework of choice for most Python developers because of how quickly you can build powerful applications.

Ruby:

1) Ruby on Rails
2) Cramp
3) Rack
4) Sinatra
5) Padrino
Winner: Rails 
Most people that have heard of ruby on rails might think that they are the same thing because of how pervasive ruby on rails is in the ruby community. Rails powers some amazing websites and has an amazing community behind it. It is a great choice for a web framework; just keep in mind hiring rails developers ain’t cheap.

JavaScript:

1) Ember
2) Backbone
3) Angular
Winner: Ember
Javascript as a backend framework has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Personally I do not have a lot of experience in this space but have heard great things from some really amazing developers who do.  Ember seems to be the most powerful of the three major JavaScript frameworks. It might be more expensive to develop in than the other two but it should pay out in the long run if you’re in it for the long haul.

Others:

Java, C++, ASP.net, Pearl, and more.
There are also Java and other programming language frameworks like ASP.net but I do not have a lot of experience or knowledge in those frameworks. From what I have heard most of the other programming language frameworks are slower and offer less per dollar value invested relative to the frameworks mentioned above but if you feel they are a good fit just make sure you know what you are getting into.
Conclusion:
Take the time to do the research about what CMS platform or framework you feel comfortable building your online presence with. This should last you at least 3 to 5 years or you have made the wrong decision so dont be afraid to take several months doing the research.

Step 3: Designs, Wireframes, & UI/UX

Your website design and user experience is essential for building a successful online presence.  You should absolutely invest in a responsive design that will allow your site to be mobile friendly without building a separate mobile site. Mobile traffic is exploding and responsive design is crucial for a strong UI/UX across all device sizes.
Once you have chosen your platform its time to think about the type of budget you have for design. You may be able to couple your design budget with your development budget for certain agencies such as our team at Trellis who are strong in both areas, or you may want to hire a development and design team separately to build and design your website.

Low Budget: < $5,000

Medium Budget: $5,000 – $20,000

High Budget: $20,000 +

Be up front about your budget. Don’t expect the world for a few hundred dollars. If you are limited by budget do your best to maximize what little you have to work with and focus on what is most important for your design.
A themeforest theme is a cheap way to get a decent front-end framework up on WordPress that can supplement some of the more expensive custom wireframe and design work. However, a theme will still take a lot of work and energy to look presentable, so don’t expect a beautiful website just because you bought a nice WordPress or Magento theme.
Things to consider for UI/UX 
1) Content
2) Fonts & Font Sizes
3) Colors
4) Images
5) Contrast
6) Flat vs Realism
Your content will shape the design of your site so make sure you are in open communication about what types and amount of content will be on each web page when you are working with your design firm or your in house designers.

Step 4: Web Development

You want to separate your design and development budget even if you are going with the same firm. The more unique pages you need designed, the larger your design budget will need to be, and the more complex features your website requires, the larger your development budget will have to be. These numbers are meant for non-eCommerce sites. I would double or triple these numbers for eCommerce websites.

Low budget:  <$10,000 

Medium Budget: $10,000 -$50,000 

High Budget: $50,000 +

Now if you have a low budget you will probably have to find a freelancer or small agency that works with low budgets. A medium budget will allow you to work with a wider ranger of agencies, and a higher budget might allow you to work with some of the top agencies. However, for eCommerce your budget will have to be much higher than the average non eCommerce web project.
In most cases you will have to hire a third party to develop your website, because an in house web developer will be relatively expensive compared to hiring an agency or freelancer.  If you do have the budget for an in house developer or team, make sure you find one that will be confident working with the technology you’re using such as WordPress, Magento, or some type of web framework like rails.

What should I be looking for?

What you should be looking for in development is clean, scalable code. What does this mean? I could hack together a website that looks great on the front end when you go to the site, but as soon as you want to add new features or pages everything falls apart. Clean and scalable code is written in an organized fashion without disrupting or modifying any core features of a platform like WordPress so that when you add new features or update the WordPress software everything works fine.
This type of development is more expensive, so if you think are getting the same product for half the price by outsourcing to overseas development or a firm that says they can do it for cheaper be weary and make sure you are confident in their development skills.

Why such a large range in price for just building an online foundation?

For people who are unfamiliar with the web, a great analogy to better explain why websites range so much in price is the car analogy. Building a websites is like buying a new car; you get what you pay for. A car can look great on the outside but under the hood could be a disaster. This is why you are taking a risk going with an unproven free-lancer or cheap solution. A cheaper solution is just like a cheap used car, you might get a steal or you could wind up paying thousands just to keep the thing running.
A proven agency, analogous to a new car will come with a warranty and a guarantee, but at a much higher price.  If you want to run your business online like a BMW, Audi, Mercedes, or another high-end car you will have to spend a little more. There will be maintenance costs as well.
You can get a car for $500 dollars that will get you from point A to B, but for how long and at what risk? You can get a website for $500 that will show up on the Internet when you go to it and have your basic information but it wont do much more then that. If you want to run your business like a Lamborghini online you will have to spend 10s if not 100s of thousands on your website to get it to that point. 
Part 2 will cover traffic acquisition and how to make your website become a real business tool not just something you have because you are a business. For help with any of the first four steps to part 1, branding, technology consultation, design, and development please contact the team at Trellis for more information.